The key message is to look for opportunities with high human latency or taskswhere there is a delay for a human action to occur. Intelligence and adequately managing this policy-making culture is critical to adoption success.

Absolutely - too often there's an assumption that because it's "social" technology, people don't need training on it. And while the tech is usually relatively simple to use, the key is educating people on why they should use it and in what context, rather than just how it works.

Ah, well if you get a notification on the Hub that I posted a reply to your edit on one of my stories (which you sent by email), that was me screwing around with the Jive for Outlook plugin. Our community management folks don't seem to promote it, but I installed it in the process of doing research for my Social Collaboration for Dummies book.

Social tools are too often considered in a vacuum. But social software really needs hardware to back it up. Not to name names here, but when you're working on under-powered hardware and each page load takes a measurable number of seconds, any attempt to increase participation is going to run up against the friction of inadequate IT support.

Another way to take the fear out of social and collaborative tools: education. Training and examples of how the tools help you do your job better is essential. Company early adopters of the tech, or advocates, are good in this education/training role.

As Seinfeld's Kramer would say, this column "scratches me where I itch." The author states: "We collaborate in the context of a business activity, process or task; we engage with other people to get something done." Forcing people to step outside their natural platforms (email, IM in my case) and embrace a platform that's unnatural to them for those activities is a mistake. Social platforms must complement or plug into those natural collaboration platforms.

At the moment, the best example I'd say is Jive, which allows the creation of Jive-powered "deal rooms" in Salesforce's Sales Cloud, and also has some good pre-built integration with the likes of Box as well. Other vendors allow you to do it to some extent, but typically require more custom development, or are more lightweight in nature. It's certainly an area where there is more the vendor community can do to help customers make this work more seamlessly (and easily).

What practical applications have you seen of this embedding social in other apps? Chatter and Salesforce CRM are joined at the hip, and there are other examples of social platforms integrating with other products from the same vendor. But I haven't seen a lot of real mix and match between vendors where social features are readily available wherever employees would find them useful.

Still seems to be more theory than practice. I think having "social everywhere" is a great idea in theory, but who is really doing it?

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